Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, ...
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Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.Less

Regarding the Real : Cinema, documentary, and the visual arts

Des O'Rawe

Published in print: 2016-01-01

Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.

Through the feature films and documentaries of directors including Emmer, Erice, Godard, Hitchcock, Pasolini, Resnais, Rossellini and Storck, Jacobs examines the way films ‘animate’ artworks by means ...
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Through the feature films and documentaries of directors including Emmer, Erice, Godard, Hitchcock, Pasolini, Resnais, Rossellini and Storck, Jacobs examines the way films ‘animate’ artworks by means of cinematic techniques, such as camera movements and editing, or by integrating them into a narrative. He explores how this ‘mobilization’ of the artwork is brought into play in art documentaries and artist biopics, as well as in feature films containing key scenes situated in museums. The tension between stasis and movement is also discussed in relation to modernist cinema, which often includes tableaux vivants combining pictorial, sculptural and theatrical elements. This tension also marks the aesthetics of the film still, which have inspired prominent art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall. Illustrated throughout, Jacobs’ study of the presence of art in film, alongside the omnipresence of the filmic image in today's art museums, is an engaging work for students and scholars of film and art alike.Less

Framing Pictures : Film and the Visual Arts

Steven Jacobs

Published in print: 2011-06-13

Through the feature films and documentaries of directors including Emmer, Erice, Godard, Hitchcock, Pasolini, Resnais, Rossellini and Storck, Jacobs examines the way films ‘animate’ artworks by means of cinematic techniques, such as camera movements and editing, or by integrating them into a narrative. He explores how this ‘mobilization’ of the artwork is brought into play in art documentaries and artist biopics, as well as in feature films containing key scenes situated in museums. The tension between stasis and movement is also discussed in relation to modernist cinema, which often includes tableaux vivants combining pictorial, sculptural and theatrical elements. This tension also marks the aesthetics of the film still, which have inspired prominent art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall. Illustrated throughout, Jacobs’ study of the presence of art in film, alongside the omnipresence of the filmic image in today's art museums, is an engaging work for students and scholars of film and art alike.

The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the ...
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The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the first book to analyse how a range of different ethnicities have been represented across contemporary French visual culture. Via a wide series of case studies – from the worldwide hit film Amélie to France’s popular TV series Plus belle la vie – it probes how ethnicities have been represented across different media, including film, photography, television and the visual arts. Four chapters examine distinct areas of particular importance: national identity, people of Algerian heritage, Jewishness and France’s second city Marseille.Less

Representing Ethnicity in Contemporary French Visual Culture

Joseph McGonagle

Published in print: 2017-01-05

The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the first book to analyse how a range of different ethnicities have been represented across contemporary French visual culture. Via a wide series of case studies – from the worldwide hit film Amélie to France’s popular TV series Plus belle la vie – it probes how ethnicities have been represented across different media, including film, photography, television and the visual arts. Four chapters examine distinct areas of particular importance: national identity, people of Algerian heritage, Jewishness and France’s second city Marseille.

Arguing that Yeats's very strong interest in the visual arts almost of itself programmed such an interest in a succeeding generation of Irish poets, this chapter demonstrates the relationship – in ...
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Arguing that Yeats's very strong interest in the visual arts almost of itself programmed such an interest in a succeeding generation of Irish poets, this chapter demonstrates the relationship – in Yeats himself, and then in John Montague, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney. The chapter argues that ekphrasis – the writing of poems on paintings – is a prominent element of modern Irish poetry and that it has various effects: personal, social, cultural and political. Individual poems are read to uncover such things as: an exploration of the gallery as post-religious cultural space; the rendering of pictorial stasis as literary narrative; attitudes to Irish political violence meditated and mediated out of art history; the ambivalences of poems written about self-representation by painters. The chapter centrally includes a long discussion of Derek Mahon's famous poem ‘Courtyards in Delft’ and Seamus Heaney's ‘A Basket of Chestnuts'.Less

The Celebration of Waiting : Moments in the History of Modern Irish Poetry and the Visual Arts

Neil Corcoran

Published in print: 2014-09-01

Arguing that Yeats's very strong interest in the visual arts almost of itself programmed such an interest in a succeeding generation of Irish poets, this chapter demonstrates the relationship – in Yeats himself, and then in John Montague, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney. The chapter argues that ekphrasis – the writing of poems on paintings – is a prominent element of modern Irish poetry and that it has various effects: personal, social, cultural and political. Individual poems are read to uncover such things as: an exploration of the gallery as post-religious cultural space; the rendering of pictorial stasis as literary narrative; attitudes to Irish political violence meditated and mediated out of art history; the ambivalences of poems written about self-representation by painters. The chapter centrally includes a long discussion of Derek Mahon's famous poem ‘Courtyards in Delft’ and Seamus Heaney's ‘A Basket of Chestnuts'.

Istwa across the Water draws on the historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics as cultural exchange that is patterned after the back and forth movement of the ocean’s waves, to ...
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Istwa across the Water draws on the historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics as cultural exchange that is patterned after the back and forth movement of the ocean’s waves, to explore Haitian cultural production through the lenses of history and memory by way of the Vodou concept of the Marasa or twinned entities. Istwa across the Water takes on Haiti’s complementary or twinned sites of cultural production in the West African area of Dahomey/Benin Republic and the Central West African Kôngo region from which many Haitians originate. It discusses oral and visual art traditions from both sides of the Atlantic divide as a means to explore the dynamic and constantly evolving exchange of physical and spiritual energies between Haiti and its “motherlands” (sites of origin) as Spirit seeks to restore the balance that was lost during the transatlantic trade and slave era.Less

Istwa Across the Water : Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination

Toni Pressley-Sanon

Published in print: 2017-04-04

Istwa across the Water draws on the historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics as cultural exchange that is patterned after the back and forth movement of the ocean’s waves, to explore Haitian cultural production through the lenses of history and memory by way of the Vodou concept of the Marasa or twinned entities. Istwa across the Water takes on Haiti’s complementary or twinned sites of cultural production in the West African area of Dahomey/Benin Republic and the Central West African Kôngo region from which many Haitians originate. It discusses oral and visual art traditions from both sides of the Atlantic divide as a means to explore the dynamic and constantly evolving exchange of physical and spiritual energies between Haiti and its “motherlands” (sites of origin) as Spirit seeks to restore the balance that was lost during the transatlantic trade and slave era.

This chapter undertakes a critical survey of a number of the most prominent African American visual artists whose satirical work engages with the “Post-Black” designation coined by Thelma Golden and ...
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This chapter undertakes a critical survey of a number of the most prominent African American visual artists whose satirical work engages with the “Post-Black” designation coined by Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon for the 2001 Freestyle show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This chapter argues that “Post-Black” artists represent a generational shift in subject matter, style, and rhetoric, separating these artists from those of the Civil Rights period. Key to this generational shift are the frustrations that accompany notions of identity and belongingness that contemporary artists find to be stifling and exclusionary.Less

Post-Black Art and the Resurrection of African American Satire

Derek Conrad Murray

Published in print: 2014-07-01

This chapter undertakes a critical survey of a number of the most prominent African American visual artists whose satirical work engages with the “Post-Black” designation coined by Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon for the 2001 Freestyle show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This chapter argues that “Post-Black” artists represent a generational shift in subject matter, style, and rhetoric, separating these artists from those of the Civil Rights period. Key to this generational shift are the frustrations that accompany notions of identity and belongingness that contemporary artists find to be stifling and exclusionary.

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history ...
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This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studiesLess

The Hurt(ful) Body : Performing and Beholding Pain, 1600-1800

Published in print: 2017-08-30

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies

This chapter shows the vital role of injury and suffering in redefining art practices and aesthetic experience from the 1750s onwards. It investigates the role of Burke’s sublime in the introduction ...
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This chapter shows the vital role of injury and suffering in redefining art practices and aesthetic experience from the 1750s onwards. It investigates the role of Burke’s sublime in the introduction of a new lust for pain, which was combined with an equally painful call for the amplification of visual experiences – real and imitated. Sarafianos stresses Burke’s uncivil redefinition of sympathy as a painful delight in the suffering of others, and argues that, despite established anti-visual interpretations of Burke’s sub lime, such extreme forms of suffering are at the root of the way in which his Philosophical Enquiry (1757) built powerful continuities between ‘real sympathy’ and the reality of imitations in painting or theatre. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates that the same principles led to the reorganisation of the entire visual field: bodies in pain, painstaking styles of representation and hurtful habits of seeing were tied up in ways that determined the bursting forth of a specially modern kind of realism. Sarafianos uses Sir Charles Bell’s gruesome surgical sketches from Waterloo (1815) in order to show that the same tangle of hurtful experiences, tailored on Burke’s precise guidelines, encapsulated drives and aspirations for a ‘sublime real’ with a long career in modern art and criticism.Less

Wounding realities and ‘painful excitements’: real sympathy, the imitation of suffering and the visual arts after Burke’s sublime

Aris Sarafianos

Published in print: 2017-08-30

This chapter shows the vital role of injury and suffering in redefining art practices and aesthetic experience from the 1750s onwards. It investigates the role of Burke’s sublime in the introduction of a new lust for pain, which was combined with an equally painful call for the amplification of visual experiences – real and imitated. Sarafianos stresses Burke’s uncivil redefinition of sympathy as a painful delight in the suffering of others, and argues that, despite established anti-visual interpretations of Burke’s sub lime, such extreme forms of suffering are at the root of the way in which his Philosophical Enquiry (1757) built powerful continuities between ‘real sympathy’ and the reality of imitations in painting or theatre. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates that the same principles led to the reorganisation of the entire visual field: bodies in pain, painstaking styles of representation and hurtful habits of seeing were tied up in ways that determined the bursting forth of a specially modern kind of realism. Sarafianos uses Sir Charles Bell’s gruesome surgical sketches from Waterloo (1815) in order to show that the same tangle of hurtful experiences, tailored on Burke’s precise guidelines, encapsulated drives and aspirations for a ‘sublime real’ with a long career in modern art and criticism.

As the first book-length study of Robert Frank’s work in film and video, Awakening the Eye provides a new account of the career of one of America’s most important twentieth-century artists. Keeping ...
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As the first book-length study of Robert Frank’s work in film and video, Awakening the Eye provides a new account of the career of one of America’s most important twentieth-century artists. Keeping the dual nature of Frank’s career as a photographer-filmmaker in mind, each of the chapters pays particular attention to those instances when ideas and ways of working developed in one media leave their mark on another. By examining Frank’s films in the context of his more widely recognized photographic work, this study stands as a model of cross-media history in which film and photography are viewed not as divergent fields, but as complicit in their search for new forms of visual expression. Awakening the Eye is about the intricate material negotiations that define Frank’s engagement with photography, film and writing; it is also about the artist’s determination to forge a revealing and highly personal connection between the events and circumstances of his life and the material qualities of his work.Less

Awakening the Eye : Robert Frank's American Cinema

George Kouvaros

Published in print: 2015-09-01

As the first book-length study of Robert Frank’s work in film and video, Awakening the Eye provides a new account of the career of one of America’s most important twentieth-century artists. Keeping the dual nature of Frank’s career as a photographer-filmmaker in mind, each of the chapters pays particular attention to those instances when ideas and ways of working developed in one media leave their mark on another. By examining Frank’s films in the context of his more widely recognized photographic work, this study stands as a model of cross-media history in which film and photography are viewed not as divergent fields, but as complicit in their search for new forms of visual expression. Awakening the Eye is about the intricate material negotiations that define Frank’s engagement with photography, film and writing; it is also about the artist’s determination to forge a revealing and highly personal connection between the events and circumstances of his life and the material qualities of his work.

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries seeks to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s writing alongside the work of other women writers during the first decades of the twentieth-century. This volume ...
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Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries seeks to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s writing alongside the work of other women writers during the first decades of the twentieth-century. This volume not only expands our understanding of an unprecedented number of female writers but also helps us comprehend the ways that these writers contributed to and complicated modernist literature. It explores how burgeoning communities and enclaves of women writers intersected with and coexisted alongside Virginia Woolf and emphasizes both the development of enclaves and specific female subcultures or individual writers who were contemporaneous with Virginia Woolf. The essays in the first section, “Who Are Virginia Woolf’s Female Contemporaries,” explore the boundaries of contemporaneity by considering women across nation, time, and class. The second section, “Cultural Contexts,” explores Woolf’s connections to early twentieth-century culture such as film and book societies. The two final sections, “Recovery and Recuperation,” and “Connections Between Canonical Writers,” illuminate the interlocking network of women writers and artists, the former through women who have been bereft of scholarly attention and the latter through women who have received more scholarly attention. One of the most enticing sections of the volume is the collection of essays presented during the conference’s Jane Marcus’s memorial. Three of Marcus’s students celebrate the life, work, and influence of this unparalleled Woolf scholar.Less

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

Published in print: 2016-06-29

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries seeks to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s writing alongside the work of other women writers during the first decades of the twentieth-century. This volume not only expands our understanding of an unprecedented number of female writers but also helps us comprehend the ways that these writers contributed to and complicated modernist literature. It explores how burgeoning communities and enclaves of women writers intersected with and coexisted alongside Virginia Woolf and emphasizes both the development of enclaves and specific female subcultures or individual writers who were contemporaneous with Virginia Woolf. The essays in the first section, “Who Are Virginia Woolf’s Female Contemporaries,” explore the boundaries of contemporaneity by considering women across nation, time, and class. The second section, “Cultural Contexts,” explores Woolf’s connections to early twentieth-century culture such as film and book societies. The two final sections, “Recovery and Recuperation,” and “Connections Between Canonical Writers,” illuminate the interlocking network of women writers and artists, the former through women who have been bereft of scholarly attention and the latter through women who have received more scholarly attention. One of the most enticing sections of the volume is the collection of essays presented during the conference’s Jane Marcus’s memorial. Three of Marcus’s students celebrate the life, work, and influence of this unparalleled Woolf scholar.